Reading Time:2minutes The lockdown in Lebanon has been extended for a fourth time, till May 24. Easing measures are seeing those who can slowly reopen businesses and try to get back to work. But protests have also sprung anew. The reality is for many, there was no work before the lockdown began, and there will be none…

Reading Time:5minutes In the immediacy of the coronavirus crisis, the most pertinent insurance question for the holder of a medical policy is simple: Who will pay if I need to be hospitalized? The answer, as with many things in Lebanon, depends. According to Nadine Habbal, acting head of Lebanon’s Insurance Control Commission, slightly more than half of…

Reading Time:5minutes Lebanon’s insurance sector is highly fragmented, featuring extreme competition between small local players, bank-affiliate insurers, providers that are parts of multinational insurance giants, and—outside of the regulated sphere of commercial insurance companies—even quasi-insurers with competitive privileges that are categorized as mutual funds. The diverse and overpopulated sector, mired in opacity of companies, has not been…

Reading Time:11minutes The September 15 attack on Saudi oil facilities that temporarily wiped out 5 percent of global supply did more than trigger a short-term oil trading frenzy with wild price jumps on international markets. It put into sharp relief the issue of Lebanon’s dependency on fossil fuel and—most important in the context of dismal fiscal health—its…

Reading Time:14minutes For all the good that numbers can do for explaining economic and social trajectories, statistics provide limited utility. This is exacerbated into rapidly decreasing utility when social and economic issues are of immense complexity and have divergent, contradictory, or confusing data points attached to them. Things get even worse when an issue extends beyond economic…

Reading Time:8minutes After nearly a decade of preparation and debate, Lebanon’s Parliament finally ratified an access to information law in January. The country is consistently perceived as corrupt, according to global watchdog Transparency International, and Lebanon does not rate highly on the World Bank’s ease of doing business index. Enforcement of this new law might, over time,…

Reading Time:21minutes An awakened anger against the Lebanese government’s corruption and ineptitude has given birth to a growing country-wide popular movement. Young and old, rich and poor, political and apolitical, the movement has seen all sorts of people take part. But what these protesters do have in common is one very important thing: they are not coming…